The group of twenty-nine had been narrowed down to eighteen, she said, and she thought the chances of our all getting on were now excellent. We had to do only one more thing: return to Los Angeles to play a mock version of the game. This time we’d have to carpool, she said, so the next Wednesday thirteen of us drove up in three cars (the others went separately). Once again, we had a drink together and then reassembled in the small second-floor office.

Despite his role as the father of San Diego ticket-scalping agencies, Rys is an odd duck. He consistently expresses ambivalent feelings about scalping and he claims that he entered the business because he thought he could provide a service. “People did not want to wait in line to get the tickets. I thought it could be an honest enterprise.” Now he says his opinion has changed and he staunchly asserts that ticket-scalping agencies, his own included, should be outlawed. “Tickets are a dirty business,”

One must merely turn one's back on the material world and fill one’s consciousness with Krishna. And so the devotees abstain from all intoxicants and meat; they sleep little and eat less. Most are celibate, and even married couples trying to conceive children have sex only once a month — on the woman’s most fertile day — but the occasion is almost overshadowed by the extra hours of chanting required.

“Steady, Yucon, it’s okay boy, calm down now Yucon.” Rich and DeGroot croon. The difficulty of the job registers on both their faces. DeGroot forces most of the barbiturate through the needle and into the vein. Yucon’s breathing slows, his body begins to go lax, and by the time the needle is withdrawn the dog’s eyes have rolled upward and the eyelids have closed.

Finding a manuscript that looked likely to be accepted, we read through it quickly to check for character development, plot, conflict, and resolution, and most important, the sex count. Keeping close tab on the number of pages spent in description of shin-to-shin contact, we divided that number by the total number of pages in the book to derive this magic quotient. Fifty percent was the sexual threshold.

The surgeon searches the inside of the knee for the torn piece of cartilage. Once he locates it he punches two more holes in the skin of the patient’s knee, one for the blunt-nosed “hook” and one for scissors. He maneuvers the hook under the torn cartilage and lifts it up. “Then,” says Bergen, “you reach the scissors in through the other hole, snip off the torn part, and extract that baby right through the skin.”